Information
Today regularly reports on the products and opinions of information vendors. But what about their most important
customers: libraries? Whatissues
confront them today, and how, as information and library services become
increasingly digital, do librarians view the future? I
sought the opinions of librarians at
Pennsylvania
’s
Swarthmore
College
,
one of the top three liberal arts colleges in the
U.S.

Founded by Quakers in 1864,
Swarthmore
College
lies some 20 miles southwest of
Philadelphia
. With an enrollment of just 1,400 students, it’s a small
school. It has, however, always punched
above its weight. Three former graduates
are Nobel Prize winners, and other prominent alumni include novelist James
Michener, former Massachusetts governor (and one-time U.S. presidential
hopeful) Michael Dukakis, computer visionary Ted Nelson (who coined the term
“hypertext”), and Thomas McCabe, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board from 1948 to 1951 and former president of
Scott Paper Co.

It was McCabe who donated the main library to the college. Built in the late 1960s, the McCabe
Library is a formidable, large, stone fortress dominating the college hill that overlooks the tree-lined avenue.
Its dominance is intentional. The architects
believed that an academic library should form the “very heart of a college” and
so “occupy a vital position” on the grounds.

There are also two small
subject libraries on campus—the Cornell Science Library and the Underhill Music Library—and a number of special collections, including the Friends
Historical Library, the world’s largest collection of books and manuscripts
related to the Quakers, and the Peace
Collection, a research archive devoted to materials covering nongovernmental
efforts toward peace.

Including faculty, the Swarthmore library serves around 1,800 users, and it employs 35 staff members. What
distinguishes Swarthmore, says head of reference Anne Garrison, is the
personal service it can provide. “Compared with an ARL library—which is likely
to have 20,000 to 30,000 students and where you
may see a student just once during their stay—you actually recognize students
at Swarthmore. We like to think we offer a more personal, Ritz-style service as
a result.”

Consortium

But being small has disadvantages too. With current holdings of
around 700,000, Swarthmore’s collection cannot by itself meet the needs of
today’s students and researchers. It has, therefore, partnered with two local
colleges, Haverford and Bryn Mawr.

Initially, says Meg Spencer, head of the Cornell Science
Library, this partnership amounted to little
more than ad hoc exchanges of books
and journals. Over time, however, it has developed into a substantial cooperative venture called the Tri-College
Library Consortium.

Among other things, the
consortium provides mutual borrowing rights for patrons and, following
the development of a combined online catalog called Tripod, the ability to search the 3 million holdings
of the three colleges. “Tripod allows patrons
to see exactly what is available in all three libraries,” says Garrison. “And we
have a van that visits the three libraries twice a day, so people can
get material in 24 hours.”

Additionally, the
consortium is a member of the
regional E-ZBorrow system, which enables library users to search the
catalog of 40 other college and university libraries
in
Pennsylvania
—a
combined holding of around 35 million books.

More recently, the interlibrary lending system has been automated, allowing patrons to request items
electronically. In the case of the Tri-College and E-ZBorrow libraries,
requests can be made directly with the holding library using a Swarthmore
library bar code. If an item is not available locally, a national ILL order can be placed by completing an online form.
Moreover, while books still need to be physically collected from the library,
an increasing number of journal articles are now sent to patrons
electronically via the Ariel document delivery service.

Automation has led to an explosion in usage, says Peggy Seiden,
Swarthmore’s head librarian. “Over the last year, we’ve seen a 35-percent
increase in interlibrary loans.” Indeed, it
has become so easy to obtain materials at Swarthmore that a visiting
faculty member from
New York
University
—whose wife teaches at the college—confided
to me that he finds it easier to do his research at Swarthmore than in
New York
.

The library also offers access to more than 150 online services. “Most ofthe services used by
our patrons tend to be the interdisciplinary ones like Web of Science,
InfoTrac, and LexisNexis Academic,” explains Spencer. “But we have lots of
specialized databases too.”

These include BIOSIS, INSPEC, Early English Books Online, and ERIC as well as electronic journal
databases like ScienceDirect, Kluwer Online, and PubMed.

To help users exploit this growing array of electronic resources, the McCabe Library is awash with PCs
and terminals. It also has a wireless network that allows patrons with laptops
to access online services while roaming the
library. Should they need any help or guidance while doing so, they can
use an online reference service called LiveHelp and “chat” with librarians in
real time.

In effect, by heavily
exploiting electronic services, Swarthmore is now able to provide much
of the reach and punch of a large library while retaining all the benefits of a
smaller one. As more and more content
becomes digital, the benefits are expected to increase.

New Challenges

But using online services has brought new challenges too.
First, online access is now so easy and convenient that students have begun to restrict their research to online
information alone. “Many are now selecting
all their resources this way,” says Spencer. “As a librarian, this
drives me crazy. I realize there is a lot of really good stuff online now, but
there is still a lot of great stuff in print too. They are just not being very
discerning.”

While this is not so serious at the undergraduate level, where
much of the research is directed by faculty, Spencer worries about the
implications for those going on to graduate work. “If they only use online sources, they are relying entirely on what
vendors give them. They are trusting the vendors to
say: ‘This is the world of knowledge. It is all you need.’ In effect, they are self-censoring.”

A second and more alarming problem is the increasing cost of
online resources and the growing inflexibility of publishers to meet the needs
of individual libraries, particularly where
the publisher has a monopoly on important resources. Elsevier, for
instance, now owns so many journals that it can insist that libraries buy
entire portfolios rather than single titles.

What frustrates Spencer is that Elsevier’s size has given it
enough power that the normal rules of the
marketplace—where customers decide how much they’ll spend and on what—no
longer appear to operate. “The biggest
issue for us is that we are absolutely locked into spending a big chunk
of money with Elsevier,” she says.

Last spring, for instance,
the library had to mandate a 5-percent journal cut. When Spencer went to
the academic departments to discuss what could be culled, faculty immediately
proposed canceling a journal that nobody uses, and which costs $9,000 a year.
Spencer comments angrily: “I had to say, ‘We can’t
touch that because it is an Elsevier journal, and we are committed to spending
half a million dollars with them.’”

Moreover, negotiating with
Elsevier, says Spencer with a grimace, has become a nightmare. “Right now, our relationship with
them could be described as stormy at best.”

Last year, Spencer sat with
her Tri-College colleagues to try to negotiate renewal of the
ScienceDirect subscription. “These meetings are just mind-numbing,” she says. “We would say, ‘How come we areforced to spend this amount of money?’ They would reply, ‘You can cancel journals, but you still have
to spend half a million dollars with us.’ We just sat there saying, ‘How can you tell us what we have to spend with you?’”

Eventually, Elsevier agreed to a 2-percent cancellation
allowance, but with negotiations still bogged down, Swarthmore agreed to only a 1-year contract. “So the whole
frustrating process will have to start again,” says Spencer.

She adds that as more journals go online, everyone is jumping on the gravy train. “Recent decisions
by Nature and Science are
leading me to hate Elsevier less and less,” says Spencer. “Right now, Science is top of my list. They
just announced an online deal in which our costs will rise from $600 to $3,000.
And Nature has
done the same thing.”

Spencer finally drew the line with The New England Journal of Medicine.
“Previously, we could get access for a small sum. Now, they want to charge us a
couple of thousand dollars. My response was: ‘OK. We don’t need it. We’ve got
it in print.’ I’m just going to have to say to patrons, ‘Sorry about the
inconvenience, but this is just insane.’”

“What has really thrown
me,” she adds, “is that even a not-for-profit organization like the ACS is
behaving in the same way.”

The whole thing, she concludes, is nonsensical. “When we
started having electronic journals, it was supposed to be cheaper. Besides, if
you think about the production costs, you have to wonder why Science is suddenly charging
$3,000 for something that they are putting online anyway. They have no
production costs, no postage, no paper costs—but they are charging five times
more for online than they are for print.”

Where They Want to Be

Ironically, despite the explosion of online access, the
greatest challenge facing the Swarthmore library today is a desperate shortage
of physical space. “Space is the number-one issue, and we are not currently able to increase that space or obtain
additional funding for compact shelving,” says Seiden. “We are therefore
looking into the possibilities of remote storage.”

The problem, says Seiden, is that although more and more
content is becoming available electronically, “to date, publishers have failed
to find a way of delivering e-books effectively.” As a result, the library is
still acquiring an additional 20,000 volumes a year. For Seiden, this means
having to fund both an ever-expanding physical repository plus a state-of-the-art electronic infrastructure.As she
puts it, “We are currently trying to do both, and that is squeezing us.”

At some point, however, this will
surely change, and books will also be distributed electronically. When this happens, what will be the implications?
After all, more and more library services can now be accessed remotely without
the need for patrons to physically enter the building. Faculty who are sitting in their offices or
students who are sitting in their dorm rooms with a wireless-enabled laptop can
access online databases, conduct searches on the Tripod and E-ZBorrow catalogs,
and place online ILL requests. When everything can also be delivered
electronically, can we expect the library
to wither away and become little more than a virtual service department?
If so, perhaps the McCabe fortress will begin to look increasingly superfluous?

Garrison is skeptical. “Just come and work here for a day, and
you’ll see the library is far from withering away,” she responds. “Sure, it can
be accessed remotely, but that is good. It means that it is growing beyond the
fortress concept. I’m not at all paranoid about that.”

Spencer agrees. What the doomsayers miss, she says, is the important social function that libraries
can play. “Yes, the kids all have their own computers today, and they can
access the databases around the campus, but they come here. This is where they want to be. The fact is that the
library is the social center of the college.”

Regular visitors to McCabe would have to agree. The building,
which is open until 1 a.m. and offers an abundance of desks and comfortable
chairs, is constantly crammed with students. Some are studying quietly, some are talking together in small
groups, and quite a few are slumped asleep—whether from a hard night of
studying or a surfeit of social interaction is not always clear. For those
determined to stay awake, a nighttime coffee bar dispenses regular caffeine
hits.

Seiden is keen to promote this social aspect of the library.
Her hope is that she can square the financial circle by realizing savings from
the automation of library processes. “The more electronic resources we use, for
instance, the less binding we have to do. And with online invoicing, we are
beginning to see a shift away from the traditional heavy backroom work that
paper invoicing requires to less labor-intensive processes.”

“Librarianship, and what libraries do, is changing rapidly, but
libraries have been changing for decades,” concludes Garrison. “In the 1970s,
it was the onset of microfilm and then the early mainframe. Everyone was
saying, ‘Oh my God, the library is doomed.’ And if you go back to the 19th
century, the same sort of things were being said. But
we’re still here!”

In short, while the technology will continue to change and their roles will continue to evolve,librarians at Swarthmore are confident that
even in the digital age, academic libraries
will remain a vital physical presence on campus. And as long as they
play an active social role too, they will continue to be the very heart of a
college.

What is less certain is the role that journal publishers will
play in this brave new world. Having seriously alienated their primary customers, and with initiatives like open
archiving gaining considerable traction, they are the ones that appear more
likely to wither away. This is perhaps a lesson for book publishers too, as
they struggle to make the e-book a viable proposition.

This article has
been reprinted in its entirety from the February, 2004 issue of Information
Today with the permission of Information Today, Inc., 143 Old Marlton Pike,
Medford ,
NJ
08055
.
609/654-6266, http://www.infotoday.com.